And then yesterday, the Mail ran with the story that he’d once wished Margaret Thatcher dead:

Fury over ‘moral reprobate’ Labour candidate who wrote of disappointment that Mrs Thatcher didn’t die in the Brighton bomb
The Labour candidate in the crucial Eastleigh by-election said he wished Margaret Thatcher had been murdered in the IRA attack on Brighton’s Grand Hotel. Left-winger John O’Farrell felt a ‘surge of excitement’ when he heard of the attempted assassination in 1984 and was ‘disappointed’ the terrorists failed. He asked himself repeatedly: ‘Why did she have to leave the bathroom two minutes earlier?’ The bathroom of Lady Thatcher’s suite was wrecked in the explosion. She had been in it shortly before the bomb went off.

This prompted an understandably aggrieved Norman Tebbit to pose the uncomfortable question:

It’s almost 15 years since I first read Things Can Only Get Better. Though we’re different generations, as a then Labour member a lot of John O’Farrell’s memoir rang true to me — and what I remembered of it was a lot more reflective than the selective snippets in the Mail suggest.

So I had a quick re-read of the offending section this evening (pages 110-115 in my paperback edition). My memory hadn’t let me down. John O’Farrell is reflecting on the hatred he and much of the left then felt for Mrs Thatcher at the height of the miners’ strike. He doesn’t do so proudly, but honestly:

I hated Mrs Thatcher more and more with the passing of each day. I hated her more than was healthy.

And he contrasts the passions of that period with his own contribution to it:

… I felt ashamed as I realised that the only campaigning I had done during that long and painful year was for the election of the president of the Exeter University Guild of Students: an organisation of which my friends and I were no longer even members. The irrelevant posturing of student politics was our only outlet.

These aren’t the words (I don’t think) of a cruel-hearted assassin-once-removed: they’re the stark, uncompromising memories of a thwarted, student radical lefty.

So why only half a defence? Two reasons. First, John O’Farrell himself only half-recants his death-wish for Mrs T:

I just hated her so very, very much. But with some justification, it has to be said. And though some might argue that I should not have been prepared to countenance undemocratic means to get rid of her, she was not being particularly democratic in the way she exercised and extended her power.

This now is the adult O’Farrell writing, and I don’t buy his moral equivalence. (To be honest, I’m not sure he does, either.)

The second reason is that — much as I still like Things Can Only Get Better, and much as his campaign tweets are amusing me — John O’Farrell comes across to me as a deeply tribal creature. (I suspect, without any evidence, that he probably uses the tired term Con-Dems unironically.) My basis for this assumption? My only ever Twitter interaction with him, a couple of months ago:

@mrjohnofarrell Do you not think they’re told in advance order the wreaths should be laid in? You really think Clegg ‘pushes in’?

For those of us who hoped coalition politics would allow a more grown-up political debate, one in which blind adherence to party loyalties might come unstuck a little, politics since 2010 has been a bit of a disappointment. I’m afraid John O’Farrell looks like the same old, same old to me.